Saving our sofas, one exercise at a time!

Category: Weightlifting

In this, the final post on our series on weight training, we’re going to talk about endurance training. Whereas strength training is about improving your nervous system to lift heavier weights and size training is about tearing the muscle fibre down to rebuild it, Endurance is all about making the muscle produce strength for longer. This is especially useful for athletes such as runners, cyclists, hockey players, football players etc. It’s also useful for everyday chores such as cleaning and gardening, purely because your muscles won’t be as sore by the end!

At this point you may be wondering “Well, if I improve my strength and size of muscles, surely they’re better so they can work longer?”, nope! Your skeletal muscle fibres (the ones generally considered as muscles to train) consist of 3 types:

Hey, welcome to the third post in our series on beginning weight training! Sorry about the delay getting this post to you, electricity went out in our home, so that took over our life for a little bit! By the way, shameless plug for the company that helped us out, “Merton Electricians”, they’re Electricians in Wimbledon, great guys (You owe us one Dan 😉 )! Anyway, back to the matter at hand; training for size! Whereas training for strengthis recommended for beginners and anyone trying to improve overall health, training for size is where most will move to after a few months!

That’s because after your initial first few months, the body is now used to weight training and all those “beginner gains” stop coming. What this means is you won’t see a noticeable increase in muscle mass, though you will continue getting stronger due to the hormonal, neurological, skeletal and structural differences your body continues to go through. It’s normally at this point most get discouraged and start looking for quick fixes, like changing their routine by adding bicep curls, taking creatine, eating much more and other things. What we recommend is starting a dedicated size programme.

Welcome to the second post in our beginners series on Weight Training! Now, when it comes to weight training there are three main types of training regimes: Strength, Size and Endurance. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on the strength side of weight training. This is training to your limits with a high weight, low rep and large rest time between sets. Similar to the starting programme we recommended in the first of this series of posts. We’ll start with some of the benefits of training for strength.

Strengthens the nervous system: Possibly the largest benefit from training with this style. The way your muscles work is that the brain fires a signal through the nerves connected to the muscle that tell that muscle to engage. Strength training pushes these nerves to work harder, which causes them to adapt to pushing the muscles harder, longer and recruiting more muscle fibres at the same time. This is why you see some people who are very lean but very strong (Think of Bruce Lee!). Here are some of the benefits or training for strength:

So, you’ve decided to start weightlifting; well done! Weightlifting is the most beneficial thing you can do for your body besides eating healthily. If done safely and correctly, weightlifting helps you strengthen your bones and muscles, improve your joint and tendon health, help you lose weight and of course make you look better and improve self-esteem! There are some people that believe you should only perform cardio OR weight training, but here at Save Our Sofas, we truly believe you can only be your healthiest self if you do both.

There’s lots of information out there about how to start lifting, what routines you should do, machines Vs. free weights, how many reps, rest time, etc. etc. etc. And this can all be very confusing. What we’ve found is keeping it simple at first is always best, rather than taking in a notepad with 16 different exercises. Continue reading “Beginning Weight Training”→